Road Warriors Intel and AMD battle for attention at the next level of mobile processors--but are their new offerings even worth all the fuss?

"Price war!" sort of has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? (At least when it refers to products you buy, as opposed to products you sell.)

Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), who've been pounding each other on the desktop, are taking the skirmish on the road. You're about to be deluged by a bewildering array of laptops powered by new Pentium 4 Processor-M and Mobile Athlon 4 engines, respectively--at prices you'll find hard to resist.

Starved by two years of IT penny-pinching, the CPU giants are delivering "4" processors at pretty much the same price points as Intel's Pentium III-Ms. Their portable allies, who've suffered their own sales drought, are wrapping top memory and storage options around the new engines, throwing in the best displays and other amenities and charging as little as half what top-of-the-line portables fetched pre-recession.